Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part The Infinity

The two presiding geniuses behind Tiger Beat On The Potomac take a whack at John Boehner today — because, you know, leadership! — and, against all possible odds, they trip over an actual acorn in the process.

Boehner runs a House in which many of the traditional levers of power are gone and of little use: earmarks for members' districts, important committee assignments and the backing of party leaders for reelection. Most young conservatives don't care about any of the three — and, in fact, see all of them as manifestations of what's wrong with and corrupt about Congress and their party. They get more mileage from snubbing their leaders.

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I mean, Boehner's rather a dolt, but what do these two guys expect him to do with a caucus that believes that the essential job of government is not to govern? Henry Clay would be drunk all the time if he had Boehner's problems.

This remains the only story worth covering about how our government is operating — or, more accurately, failing to operate — in Washington, and it remains a story that TBOTP, among others, have failed dismally to cover. It is not an unfair summation of that passage to conclude that "most young conservatives" who have been elected to serve in one of the three branches of government believe their job once elected is not...to...govern. In past times, when there was an actual political power structure within the political parties, this would result in some very short political careers. But, as I've been beating on my little tin drum here ever since the 2012 Republican primaries, there is no single political power structure within the Republican party any more. There is a whole galaxy of independent political power bases, all of them capable of nominating and electing candidates, and many of them far more powerful than any of the official Republican organization. (That Republicans re-elected a pipsqueak like obvious anagram Reince Priebus as their national chairman after the catastrophe of the 2012 campaign is an indication that the job of RNC national chairman is far less than it used to be.) Bob Dole's maunderings this past weekend aside — and remember that it was Dole who greeted the election of Bill Clinton by saying that he, Bob Dole, was sent to Washington to represent the people who hadn't voted for the new president — this was not a process that began with the 2010 midterms, let alone the election of Barack Obama in 2008. It is the logical end of the long march that began with the collapse of the Goldwater campaign and the movement of conservatism geographically to the South and West, and intellectually toward an outright philosophical resistance to the idea of a national government. (And, before the myth gets rolling, Ronald Reagan was born as a politician in this movement and never really abandoned it until he discovered in 1982 that it might make him a one-term president.) Where was Bob Dole when all this was going on?

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I don't believe there ever has been a time like this in our history. We have had periods of severe political polarization before, but those were periods in which the government was polarized because of conflicting ideas of what the national government should do. Right now, we have a polarization based on the fact that an uncontrollable faction of one of our two political parties — a faction with its own sources of money and power that exist outside conventional political accountability — has decided that the only thing that the national government should do is nothing, a faction that is perfectly situated to make that at least part of a political reality, and a faction that is growing even faster out in the states than it is in Washington. What is leadership if there's more political profit in ignoring your leaders than in being led? Who, in that case, rules? The truly terrifying answer to that is that nobody does. Or, at least, nobody who is elected does.

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